The great expansion of economic activity since the end of World War II has caused an unprecedented rise in living standards, but it has also caused rapid changes in earth systems. Nearly all types of natural capital—the world’s stock of resources and services provided by nature—are in decline. Clean air, abundant and clean water, fertile soils, productive fisheries, dense forests, and healthy oceans are critical for healthy lives and healthy economies. Mounting pressures, however, suggest that the trend of declining natural capital may cast a long shadow into the future. Nature’s Frontiers: Achieving Sustainability, Efficiency, and Prosperity with Natural Capital presents a novel approach to address these foundational challenges of sustainability. A methodology combining innovative science, new data sources, and cutting-edge biophysical and economic models builds sustainable resource efficiency frontiers to assess how countries can sustainably use their natural capital more efficiently. The analysis provides recommendations on how countries can better use their natural capital to achieve their economic and environ mental goals. The report indicates that significant efficiency gaps exist in nearly every country. Closing these gaps can address many of the world’s pressing economic and environmental problems—economic productivity, health, food and water security, and climate change. Although the approach outlined in this report will entail demanding policy reforms, the costs of inaction will be far higher.
The great expansion of economic activity since the end of World War II has caused an unprecedented rise in living standards, but it has also caused rapid changes in earth systems. Nearly all types of natural capital—the world’s stock of resources and services provided by nature—are in decline. Clean air, abundant and clean water, fertile soils, productive fisheries, dense forests, and healthy oceans are critical for healthy lives and healthy economies. Mounting pressures, however, suggest that the trend of declining natural capital may cast a long shadow into the future. Nature’s Frontiers: Achieving Sustainability, Efficiency, and Prosperity with Natural Capital presents a novel approach to address these foundational challenges of sustainability. A methodology combining innovative science, new data sources, and cutting-edge biophysical and economic models builds sustainable resource efficiency frontiers to assess how countries can sustainably use their natural capital more efficiently. The analysis provides recommendations on how countries can better use their natural capital to achieve their economic and environ mental goals. The report indicates that significant efficiency gaps exist in nearly every country. Closing these gaps can address many of the world’s pressing economic and environmental problems—economic productivity, health, food and water security, and climate change. Although the approach outlined in this report will entail demanding policy reforms, the costs of inaction will be far higher.
Dr. Adrian Reuben updates one of the most highly requested topics in liver disease by inviting highly distinguished authors to address the important aspects of diagnosis and treatment of hepatocelluar carcinoma. State-of-the-art issues are addressed, including the role of oncogenic viruses, molecular and genetic guidelines, and screening and staging. Dr. Reuben, himself, concludes the issue with an important article on an agorithmic approach to diagnosis and treatment: Resect, Ablate, Replace or Intoxicate?
This student-focused text provides an emphasis on skills development. Packed with real-life examples of what can go wrong with even the most well-conceived strategies, there is a focus on realism throughout. With a highly accessible writing style, this text it is an invaluable learning tool for all students in this area.
About This Book This book is about training methods - in particular, fast second-order training methods - for multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). MLPs (also known as feed-forward neural networks) are the most widely-used class of neural network. Over the past decade MLPs have achieved increasing popularity among scientists, engineers and other professionals as tools for tackling a wide variety of information processing tasks. In common with all neural networks, MLPsare trained (rather than programmed) to carryout the chosen information processing function. Unfortunately, the (traditional' method for trainingMLPs- the well-knownbackpropagation method - is notoriously slow and unreliable when applied to many prac tical tasks. The development of fast and reliable training algorithms for MLPsis one of the most important areas ofresearch within the entire field of neural computing. The main purpose of this book is to bring to a wider audience a range of alternative methods for training MLPs, methods which have proved orders of magnitude faster than backpropagation when applied to many training tasks. The book also addresses the well-known (local minima' problem, and explains ways in which fast training methods can be com bined with strategies for avoiding (or escaping from) local minima. All the methods described in this book have a strong theoretical foundation, drawing on such diverse mathematical fields as classical optimisation theory, homotopic theory and stochastic approximation theory.
In the course of the nineteenth century, four-hand piano playing emerged across Europe as a popular pastime of the well-heeled classes and of those looking to join them. Nary a canonic work of classical music that was not set for piano duo, nary a house that could afford not to invest in them. Duets echoed from the student bedsit to Buckingham Palace, resounded in schools and in hundreds of thousands of bourgeois parlors. Like no other musical phenomenon, it could cross national, social, and economic boundaries, bringing together poor students with the daughters of the bourgeoisie, crowned heads with penniless virtuosi, and the nineteenth century often regarded it with extreme suspicion for that very reason. Four-hand piano playing was often understood as a socially acceptable way of flirting, a flurry of hands that made touching, often of men and women, not just acceptable but necessary. But it also became something far more serious than that, a central institution of the home, mediating between inside and outside, family and society, labor and leisure, nature and nurture. And writers, composers, musicians, philosophers, journalists, pamphleteers and painters took note: in the art, literature, and philosophy of the age, four-hand playing emerged as a common motif, something that allowed them to interrogate the very nature of the self, the family, the community and the state. In the four hands rushing up and down the same keyboard the nineteenth century espied, or thought to espy, an astonishing array of things. Four-Handed Monsters tells not only the story of that practice, but also the story of the astonishing array of things the nineteenth century read into it.
The German ballad was an unusual poetic genre: supposedly inspired by a treasure trove of authorless poems that had for centuries circulated among the common people, the ballad attained popularity in the form of deeply ironic poems written by some of Germany's most canonic authors. Supposedly a celebration of the oral culture of the German Volk, the ballad instead circulated through the emerging channels of nineteenth century culture industry: from anthologies and picture books via the exploding market for song settings, from the opera house to the vaudeville stage, the ballad hewed to its medieval pretence while sounding surprisingly modern. This book traces the strange trajectory of this poetic genre from its origins in the late 18th century to its political appropriations in the 20th. Throughout, the ballad and its path across a wide variety of milieus and media told a surprising and contradictory story of the German nation. What The Ballad Knows shows that, even though the ballad arrived in Germany as a literary genre, it very quickly came to make its home in between different genres and even different media - to the point that laypeople were as likely to encounter it in a concert hall, a classroom, an art museum or a choral rehearsal as they were to encounter it in a book. When cultural conservatives in the early 20th century sought to claim the ballad as a straightforward and serious vehicle of German nationalism, they ignored just how complex the ballad's relationship to the nation had been, and what complexities within nationalism the form had managed to highlight through the decades"--
For special education courses in schools of early childhood, primary and secondary education. Education for Inclusion and Diversity 5e continues to build on the concept of inclusive curriculum and the diversity of learning needs. This Australian text gives students a broad understanding of the principles of inclusive education, and the ways in which teachers can accommodate the differing learning needs of their students. It has been written by experts in the field of inclusion and special needs education with the particular aim of teaching students how to apply the ideas that have been presented in each chapter.
Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: What are the common denominators of big buzzing brands such as Google, Facebook, Groupon, Twitter, PayPal, YouTube, or LinkedIn? First of all, they are all web-based to a large extent. Google allows you to search the web. Facebook and LinkedIn lets you connect to your friends or business contacts online. Twitter allows you to absorb and share information in an unprecedented manner. PayPal facilitates millions of payment processes on the web. YouTube is the largest resource of videos online, and Groupon allows people to team up via the web and strike deals with high discounts for local services. Second, they are all relatively young compared to companies such as Microsoft, Dell, or Apple. In fact, Google and PayPal are the seniors with 13 years, while Groupon has not even celebrated its third birthday. Third, these companies have established a global presence through the impact of the lightning fast development of the Internet and effects of globalization. With Twitter as the only exception, they are pulling in millions and millions of revenue and are valued at several billion dollars. Start-ups are an important factor contributing to economic growth. They create new jobs, new or improved services and products and thus enhance general welfare. Since Birch concluded in 1979 that small firms create more new jobs than large firms, several research streams have started to examine this phenomenon. However, every year probably thousands of newly created ventures fail to cope with the challenges that are characteristic of the start-up environment. In fact, research has shown that more than half of newly founded ventures fail within two years. Hence, a strong interest of both practitioners and research scholars has been to identify success factors and shed more light on the ecosystem of start-ups and the processes that still largely take place in a black box. The approaches and results that link certain characteristics or actions to success vary widely in their theoretical background as well as the impact and practical relevance generated. Recently, the worldwide financial and economic crisis has given rise to a renewed call for more entrepreneurship and support for start-up and innovation culture. In the wake of the crisis, opinion leaders, public policy, and media have started to look again at entrepreneurial activity and start-ups as a promising provider of growth. Also web-based start-ups that had lost their reputation [...]
Dr. Reuben provides a timely update to the topic of HCC, which was last covered in 2011. The highly respected authors in his issue address advances in imaging for diagnosis, surgical resection and liver transplantation, and local and systemic therapy. The breadth of the topic is covered, with articles devoted to histopathology, classification and staging, and screening and detection.
Long recognized as the standard general reference in the field, this completely revised edition of Grainger and Allison?s Diagnostic Radiology provides all the information that a trainee needs to master to successfully take their professional certification examinations as well as providing the practicing radiologist with a refresher on topics that may have been forgotten. Organized along an organ and systems basis, this resource covers all diagnostic imaging modalities in an integrated, correlative fashion and focuses on those topics that really matter to a trainee radiologist in the initial years of training. "...the latest edition ... continues the fine tradition set by its predecessors.... help young radiologists to prepare for their examinations and continue to be a source of information to be dipped in and out of ... senior radiologists will also find the book useful ..." Reviewed by: RAD Magazine March 2015 "I am sure the current edition will be successful and help young radiologists to prepare for their examinations and continue to be a source of information to be dipped in and out of..." Reviewed by RAD Magazine, March 2015 Master the field and prepare for certification or recertification with a succinct, comprehensive account of the entire spectrum of imaging modalities and their clinical applications. Effectively apply the latest techniques and approaches with complete updates throughout including 4 new sections (Abdominal Imaging, The Spine, Oncological Imaging, and Interventional Radiology) and 28 brand new chapters. Gain the fresh perspective of two new editors—Jonathan Gillard and Cornelia Schaefer-Prokop -- eight new section editors -- Michael Maher, Andrew Grainger, Philip O’Connor, Rolf Jager, Vicky Goh, Catherine Owens, Anna Maria Belli, Michael Lee -- and 135 new contributors. Stay current with the latest developments in imaging techniques such as CT, MR, ultrasound, and coverage of hot topics such as: Image guided biopsy and ablation techniques and Functional and molecular imaging. Solve even your toughest diagnostic challenges with guidance from nearly 4,000 outstanding illustrations. Quickly grasp the fundamentals you need to know through a more concise, streamlined format. Access the full text online at Expert Consult.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.